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Water-Ski Jump Ramp, Cypress Gardens, Florida, 1950s — Archive & Atlas
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Cypress Gardens

Water-Ski Jump Ramp, Cypress Gardens, Florida, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-89493C

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At Cypress Gardens in the 1950s, the water-ski jump ramp was the institution's signature proof that Florida had figured out something the rest of the country had not: that people would drive a very long way to watch other people do something dangerous over water while smiling. A skier stands atop the floating wooden ramp as a towboat cuts its wake across Lake Eloise, having just launched another performer into the Florida air on the theory that if you did it with sufficient confidence it counted as entertainment rather than recklessness. Cypress Gardens had built its entire identity around exactly this proposition — that postwar Americans, newly mobile and newly sunburned, deserved a spectacle that combined athleticism, showmanship, and a very good chance someone would hit the water badly. The park's ski shows were by this decade syndicated on television and used in newsreels, meaning that every tourist with a camera believed they were documenting something they had privately discovered, which was precisely what the management intended them to feel. The skier on the ramp, arms out, has the posture of someone who has done this a hundred times and still lands the same way every time, which is to say, spectacularly.

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Archive & Atlas — The Archive AA-2026-89493C · jpg · Open